A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for a scanning system capable of copy and facsimile, especially to a position-retaining method and system for a scanning system in a computer network, thereby to scan multiple sheets at one time.
B. Description of the Related Art
For the concern of convenience, the flatbed scanners currently on the market are provided with hot keys for scan, print, copy and e-mail. The hot keys are implemented on the housing of the flatbed scanners. They can also be implemented as a floating menu to be displayed on the screen of a controlling host computer. The operations of the hot keys are controlled by the application program 11 of a host computer 10. The user only needs to press a hot key to perform an associated function of scan, copy, e-mail, copy, or facsimile. Based on the control of the application program 11, the image of the scanned sheet is processed by the host computer 10 and then sent to an associated computer peripheral device, such as the printer 13, or the facsimile machine 14 in response to the request of the user.
However, the output formats of a scanned sheet provided by the conventional hot keys for copy and facsimile are based on a fixed orientation (0,0). Take copy for an example. The user only needs to place a scanned sheet on a sheet table of the flatbed scanner and then press the hot key to perform the copy procedure. The hot key enables the copy routine of the host computer to directly copy the image of the scanned sheet without the interactive operations of the user. However, the printout of the scanned sheet always has its top left corner aligned to the position of (0,0) of the output paper. It does not print the scanned sheet according to its original position when placed on the sheet table.
The major problem of this output format is that it cannot scan multiple sheets at one time. To be able to scan multiple sheets, the output format of the scanned image must be able to retain the original relative position of the scanned sheet relative to the sheet table. However, if the user wants to retain the relative position of the scanned sheet relative to the sheet table, he has to pre-scan the sheet together with the entire background image of the sheet table. And then, he must crop the entire scan range of the sheet table to retain the relative position of the scanned sheet relative to the sheet table. This will inevitably increase the time for scanning because it has to process many redundant background image data.